When David Granirer jokes about being depressed, he's not kidding. He landed up in a psych ward at age 16, battled bouts of depression after a serious car accident at 26, and was formally diagnosed with clinical depression when he was 33.

After spending years in therapy and counseling, he decided to take a counseling course to become a therapist himself. It was during those years that he turned to an unlikely place to help in the healing process: his sense of humor. While working at a local crisis center, Granirer started trying out some of his jokes on the participants. The response was so overwhelming that it made Granirer realize how powerful a tool laughter could be, and its potential therapeutic effect for both himself and others.

"Humor helped me get my confidence back," explains Granirer. "Being able to take some of the painful things I'd been through and make them funny helped me to let go of them. When people laughed with me I felt like they understood and were on my side, which made a huge difference in how I felt about myself."

"Being able to take some of the painful things I'd been through and make them funny helped me to let go of them."

With Granirer turning himself into the resident funnyman, he decided to try out his luck at the local comedy club.

"I completely bombed," he confides.

But this only made him more determined. His next stop was a standup comedy program in L.A. with celebrity standup Judy Carter, and classes using the much vaunted Comedy Gym workbook -- a handbook of standup comedy formulas used by up and coming comics across the globe.

Like many Jewish comics, Granirer was determined to turn his own experience with depression into a source of humor. At the same time, in the Jewish tradition of "tikkun olam" (repairing the world), he wanted to see if his new found love of comedy could help others deal with mental illness as it had done for him.

Enter Stand up for Mental Health, a comedy course Granirer developed to help people who are struggling with mental illness and looking for alternatives to main stream therapeutic techniques.

The objective is to get participants to be comfortable with themselves and be proud of who they are.

"People with a mental illness are always being told what they can't do. In this group they get to prove what they can do," Granirer insists.

Granirer also feels that his graduates, around 60 of them so far, take aim at social stigma just by getting on the stage. "We present people with mental illness as being strong and capable and that goes against what you often hear people say."

"We present people with mental illness as being strong and capable and that goes against what you often hear people say."

After completing the course the new comics perform almost every week for an entire year. One of the places where they can perform is a venue run by Granirer himself.

Imran Ali, one of Granirer's more inventive comics, routinely sings there. The music is from "Tiny Tim's Tip Toe through the Tulips." But Ali turns it into a comical song of "tip toeing through a psych ward."

Audiences respond with laughter laced with respect for someone who has the courage to do an act like this.

Ali has schizophrenia and a couple of other disorders but that doesn't stop him. He says he's determined to make comedy his full-time career.

Granirer has also made something of a career from his innovation to treat mental illness with humor. He recently published his new book "The Happy Neurotic" (Warwick Publishers). The book goes against new age values by maintaining that "you can be happy, productive and well-adjusted while being as neurotic as ever!"

A documentary charting Granirer's work teaching stand-up comedy to those suffering with mental illness and recovering drug addicts is also underway.

Granirer admits that the pull he feels to help those who are suffering personally comes from the suffering his family endured.

David's father, grandfather and grandmother are survivors of a Romanian concentration camp. They were rescued only because a Christian relative bribed their way out.

"Any time you grow up in the shadow of that kind of stuff, you learn the value of humor and staying sane," Granirer says.

But like any good Jewish comedian, he uses his family's own difficult past, and that of his people, into a reservoir of stand-up material.

"I tell anti-Semites, ‘You're right -- we Jews are trying to take over the world, but we're really bad at it. After 2000 years we've only taken over a very small, hot, dry piece of land -- it's called Miami.'"

I've been striving to get more into spirituality. But it seems that every time I make some progress, I find myself slipping right back to where I started. I'm getting discouraged and feel like a failure. Can you help?

The Aish Rabbi Replies:

Spiritual slumps are a natural part of spiritual growth. There is a cycle that people go through when at times they feel closer to God and at times more distant. In the words of the Kabbalists, it is "two steps forward and one step back." So although you feel you are slipping, know that this is a natural process. The main thing is to look at your overall progress (over months or years) and be able to see how far you've come!

This is actually God's ingenious way of motivating us further. The sages compare this to teaching a baby how to walk. When the parent is holding on, the baby shrieks with delight and is under the illusion that he knows how to walk. Yet suddenly, when the parent lets go, the child panics, wobbles and may even fall.

At such times when we feel spiritually "down," that is often because God is letting go, giving us the great gift of independence. In some ways, these are the times when we can actually grow the most. For if we can move ourselves just a little bit forward, we truly acquire a level of sanctity that is ours forever.

Here is a practical tool to help pull you out of the doldrums. The Sefer HaChinuch speaks about a great principle in spiritual growth: "The external awakens the internal." This means that although we may not experience immediate feelings of closeness to God, eventually, by continuing to conduct ourselves in such a manner, this physical behavior will have an impact on our spiritual selves and will help us succeed. (A similar idea is discussed by psychologists who say: "Smile and you will feel happy.")

That is the power of Torah commandments. Even if we may not feel like giving charity or praying at this particular moment, by having a "mitzvah" obligation to do so, we are in a framework to become inspired. At that point we can infuse that act of charity or prayer with all the meaning and lift it can provide. But if we'd wait until being inspired, we might be waiting a very long time.

May the Almighty bless you with the clarity to see your progress, and may you do so with joy.

In 1940, a boatload 1,600 Jewish immigrants fleeing Hitler's ovens was denied entry into the port of Haifa; the British deported them to the island of Mauritius. At the time, the British had acceded to Arab demands and restricted Jewish immigration into Palestine. The urgent plight of European Jewry generated an "illegal" immigration movement, but the British were vigilant in denying entry. Some ships, such as the Struma, sunk and their hundreds of passengers killed.

If you seize too much, you are left with nothing. If you take less, you may retain it (Rosh Hashanah 4b).

Sometimes our appetites are insatiable; more accurately, we act as though they were insatiable. The Midrash states that a person may never be satisfied. "If he has one hundred, he wants two hundred. If he gets two hundred, he wants four hundred" (Koheles Rabbah 1:34). How often have we seen people whose insatiable desire for material wealth resulted in their losing everything, much like the gambler whose constant urge to win results in total loss.

People's bodies are finite, and their actual needs are limited. The endless pursuit for more wealth than they can use is nothing more than an elusive belief that they can live forever (Psalms 49:10).

The one part of us which is indeed infinite is our neshamah (soul), which, being of Divine origin, can crave and achieve infinity and eternity, and such craving is characteristic of spiritual growth.

How strange that we tend to give the body much more than it can possibly handle, and the neshamah so much less than it needs!